Overview
Alongside project delivery, a significant part of my contribution at Kiwibank has been building the operational backbone that lets design work consistently and influence decisions beyond any single screen.
- Kiwibank's design team is flat, with all designers, including me, reporting to the Head of UX
- The practice itself was new, formed around when I joined, in a business unit that was also new
- Influence here comes from earning trust and proving value, not from formal authority
This case study covers that work: process, systems, and practice, rather than a single product
Key Focus Areas
- Establishing ways of working that helped the business trust and understand what design contributes
- Serving as Channel Steward for internet banking, safeguarding design quality within the channel and alignment across others
- Taking a continuous improvement process from idea to established practice, after several earlier attempts had stalled
- Contributing to maturing design system adoption across cross-functional teams
- Championing accessibility as embedded practice, not a compliance checkbox
- Building and sharing custom AI agents to accelerate design research and validation
The Challenge
This wasn't a mature practice looking to improve. It was a new team, in a new business unit, working to establish that it should exist at all.
- UX work had previously been outsourced to agencies who, despite doing good work, lacked the business and user immersion an internal team could offer
- No consistent mechanism existed for keeping design aligned across channels as the product surface grew
- The core challenge wasn't just building better process, it was proving design's value and debunking a perception that we'd be blockers
My Role & Approach
Channel Stewardship
I am responsible for design quality and consistency within internet banking, while also safeguarding alignment across other channels.
- Ensure experiences don't diverge or contradict each other as the product evolves
- Operate both inside the channel and across it, catching inconsistencies before they reach customers
From Idea to Practice
I took Kiwibank's continuous improvement process from concept to established practice, succeeding where several earlier attempts had stalled.
- Closed process gaps that had previously blocked adoption
- Drove adoption of assessment and prioritisation frameworks with Banking and Digital Product, to fortnightly triage feedback from multiple listening posts
- Created multiple AI agents to weekly analyse feedback, assess impact, and prioritise fixes, trained on our own guidelines so every suggestion stays grounded in our standards
- Extended that same tooling beyond CI, for pre-release impact assessments and as a check on my own work as I go
- Partnered with Digital and Technology to streamline how progress gets reported to senior leadership
- Now run with a fellow Channel Steward, with foundations in place to onboard more designers as capacity allows
Growing People, Day to Day
Without a formal onboarding process (the team isn't growing fast enough to need one), mentoring here happens through consistent, hands-on presence rather than a structured programme.
- Support designers through regular 1:1s and by working alongside them, letting them take the initiative while I step in when they need support or are heading in the wrong direction
- Stay present in collab sessions and critiques even when not directly working with someone, to provide ongoing feedback
- This day-to-day involvement in others' development goes beyond what's typically expected of a Channel Steward
- One designer joined as our intern; we advocated for a junior position to be created for him, and I've worked alongside him since, on my projects early on and now supporting his own. His growth to intermediate over three years is down to his own talent and attitude; I've just been glad to support it
Establishing Ways of Working
Beyond individual processes, I've shaped how the wider business collaborates with design, replacing ambiguity with clear, repeatable structure.
- Co-designed collaboration sessions distinct from critiques and checkpointing, so stakeholders knew what kind of input was being asked of them and when
- Contributed to design principles and remain a continuous contributor to the digital strategy
- Created guidelines for content creation, revision, and approval, including how and when other business units should be integrated
- Templated and led progress monthly communications to senior stakeholders, making design's contribution visible and legible at that level
- Pioneered monitoring our releases and playing them back to interested parties, helping shape collaboration with other business units by experimenting on my own projects first
Restructuring a Library into a System
What we inherited was a component library, not a design system, permissive in the wrong places and rigid in others.
- Components were built for single use, undermining consistency as soon as anyone needed to adapt one
- No guidelines existed above atom-level, leaving system-level decisions to individual discretion
- Responsiveness had been left to Bootstrap by default, which created its own problems
- Token architecture had grown too large to navigate confidently, even after unpublishing unused primitives
- Every designer, working slightly differently, had been designing for a single channel; all are now expected to design across both web and app
Alongside the other Channel Stewards, I'm leading a restructure to turn this into an actual system:
- Simplifying the token architecture
- Rebuilding components to be flexible without sacrificing consistency
- Improving breakpoint management for responsive design
- Normalising taxonomy across web and app, now that channel siloing no longer reflects how the team works
- Leveraging my development background to serve as the primary bridge with engineering to align token architecture, responsive breakpoints, and component APIs so design and code evolve synchronously.
Accessibility & Design Advocacy
I authored internal accessibility guidelines and promoted inclusive testing practices.
- Helped shift accessibility from a compliance checkbox into an embedded part of design discussions
- Promoting Contributed to a broader culture shift in how the team approaches inclusive design testing and QA practices
